Starting with the Santa Fe - based Institute for Regional Education, ex-monk Godfrey Reggio
embarked on a cinematic journey to put his New Age pantheistic humanism on film. Koyaaniskatsi
and Powaqqatsi are plotless documentaries driven by intense Philip Glass music scores; both
dazzle in slightly different ways. Starting as a film-festival hit, the first of
the trilogy wowed the light-show freaks with its kaleidoscopic timelapse photograpy, blending
boiling cloudscapes and speeding city traffic into hypnotic patterns. Powaqqatsi was more
organic but slowed itself to a meditative crawl, and won fewer worshippers. Coming soon is
Naqqoykatsi, a third part of the trilogy that, by the looks of the trailer included on these
discs, is even more chaotic and disturbing.

These are two separate DVD releases.

Koyaaniskatsi

Synopsis:

The natural wonders of our world are contrasted with its technological marvels, in
this cinematic document of the manic world of the 'Northern' hemisphere, with its artificial
consumer world of mass marketed products and cities that hum with the energy of millions of lights
and thousands of vehicles. Somewhere in this screaming hive, human beings strive to remain human ...

The Center Cannot Hold

One of the most desired titles on DVD, Koyaaniskatsi has been out of print on a fuzzy, flat
VHS for almost twelve years. The light-'em-if-you-got'em film fans who smoked up screenings of
2001 and Fantasia went nuts over this wordless, seamless 87 minutes of boiling clouds,
blurred freeway traffic and hallucinogenic views of Las Vegas, open pit mines, a Hostess
Twinkie assembly line, and every scenic wonder in the great West. A lot of the film is done with
time-lapse photography, which speeds up action by taking only a frame or so a second, instead of
24 each second. In my editorial circles, we therefore call it TimeLapseskatsi.

The emphasis here is on technology - things, machines, vehicles, rockets, and a lot of the footage
is from stock libraries, particularly Louis Schwartzberg's Energy Productions, who had an ad in
Daily Variety each week for twenty years. Atom bombs explode and rockets surge skyward, and we hold
on the stock shots longer than usual, making them seem all the more strange.

Hypnotic repetition patterns are built into the music, and much of what we see is cyclical or
repetitive as well - the hot dogs coming out of a meat processing machine, traffic surging in cyclic
fits in New York. When we see human faces, it's a relief, although many of them are just pedestrians
in motion, dwarfed and dominated by the activity around them. The poetry of
Alphaville with its talk of the city as a
huge breathing ant hive, has become reality. And like Alphaville, the nightime cities with their
traffic represented by unbroken rivers of streaked, streaking headlights seem to exist in some
other temporal dimension.

The absence of voiceover or other overt messages causes us to concentrate on the visual patterns and
become, perhaps, absorbed by them. Encouraged by the sussuring Glass rhythms, it's easy to imagine
Koyaaniskatsi as one long, unbroken meditation on the modern world. Godfrey Reggio is
basically a modern guru. His Institute for Regional Education commercials and short subjects
were overtly subversive, but all messages are sublimated here.

MGM's DVD of Koyaaniskatsi is an immaculate transfer where even the sometimes grainy stock
footage is curried and combed to perfection. The disc's
best feature is the Greg Carson-produced interview-docu with Reggio and Glass. The
composer comes off as a earnest collaborator who marvels at the creative freedom they had to rescore
and recut sections of the film until both were satisfied. Reggio's interview is self-described as
a 'rave' and resembles nothing less than a slightly subdued version of Dennis Hopper's character
in Apocalypse Now. You get the feeling that Reggio lets loose with twenty-minute monologues
like this at the drop of a hat. With almost perfect diction, excellent speaking skills and nary an
'umm' or 'ahh', he rattles off about 1000 observations, descriptions and comparisons relating
to his film in record time, never breaking his stance of enlightened enthusiasm. He starts with the
use of a Hopi word for the title and goes from there.
The docu should be seen after the feature, so as not to dull the impact of some of the visuals, but
it will really be an asset to Koyaaniskatsi fans seeking more insight into this remarkable
artist.

Powaqqatsi

If Koyaaniskatsi is TimeLapseskatsi, then Powaqqatsi should be called
SlowMo-skatsi. Less popular (but preferred by Savant) mainly because of its
non-distribution by an uncomprehending Cannon Films, Powaqqatsi consists almost
completely of new photography of indigenous people going about their real lives. Shot for shot,
it has more remarkable and original footage than its predecessor. The visual poetry has a
tendency to become precious - one silhouette of a wise man with a staff is rather annoying - or to
show the
politics of its makers, but this followup film has a strong emotional impact to add to the first
installment's intellectual headiness.

Synopsis:

Starting with a horrifying glimpse into the living hell of a Brazilian gold mine,
where thousands of men toil like ants to haul sacks of mud up out of a huge open pit, this
examination of the roots of human civilization starts in natural agrarian societies, moves to
indigenous townships and groupings, and then jumps 'ahead' to show the same societies dwarfed,
brutalized and enslaved by the modern economics and technology of the industrialized world. People
live in garbage and work under inhuman conditions
while antiseptic skyscrapers are built around them; invisible radio waves
blanket the globe with advertising & propaganda, while resources are stolen and replaced with
mountains of pollutants. Yet the spiritual in man, represented by the Islamic call to prayer and
the undying faith of Hindus in India, persists ...

The First World Feeds on the Third

Powaqqatsi celebrates humans over technology and has a warmth that the first film lacks. There
are dozens of
beautiful faces in this show - kids, men, women, and wizened oldsters of every race and origin. We
see them at work, happily at first. There is a section in the first third where every cut, from a
circle of women threshing wheat to the spinning skirts of an Andean dancer, is so beautiful one
cannot help but exclaim out loud. Man is shown to be able to live practically anywhere: crammed into
stilt
houses around any body of water, on remote islands, in the middle of deserts and on the tops of
mountains. An Indian mud village, with its painted stucco walls, is orange and immaculate-looking;
the ritual costumes of Africans, Indians, and Andeans become a collage of color and diversity and
pride.

The imagery is then subverted by the ugliness of modern reality, with its endless ore-cars, regimented
native troops, grim and grimy sweatshops, and roads shared by vehicular traffic and barefoot, rickety-legged
men with impossible loads on their backs. There are images here that burn into
the memory: a kid who couldn't be more than seven beating the ox that pulls his huge cart, while his father
tries to rest beside him. Tons of rocks and garbage pour into a bay, possibly being dumped as landfill.
A hundred toothpicks sticking out of an abstract grid are revealed to be a sideways shot of laundry hung
from highrise windows, as a jet passes at an impossible angle. A kid in Hong Kong marvels at the beauty
of dozens of superimposed neon signs. A brief shot of soot-covered men carrying heavy loads up soot-covered
stairs in a hellish, smoking work yard is a more potent image of brute labor than anything in
Metropolis. Television is reduced to a constantly morphing display of
commercial goods, rapturous faces, and violent weapons, becoming the Hopi Powaqq - an evil,
seducing sorcerer that sucks the lifeforce of other entities to further its own life.

Unlike the abstract Koyaaniskatsi, opposing content is used to form new meanings and messages with
a decided political intent. The author's contrast of victims and oppressors becomes
all too clear and rather strident here, with blasts of music accompanying
huge closeups of 'oppressed' men staring down the camera with accusing, bitter eyes. One little black
boy holds up two fists defiantly, but trembles - with fear?. A bejeweled woman in a sari holds her child
and gazes seemingly right into our souls.

A very spiritual man, Reggio concludes Powaqqatsi with an extended lento passage,
returning to natural images, especially water, to end on an endorsement of faith
as the true center of human value. The face of a toothless shaman, smiling in rapture, mixes with
the almost perfect reflections in an Indian river. It's a return to calm and peace that becomes a visual
meditation on the fate of mankind. Whether the show's theme is an oversimplification is
debatable ... other minds would argue that the idyllic lifestyles of primitive peoples were long ago
spoiled by ovepopulation, disease, war and slavery, and without benefit of modern technology. And there's
plenty of arguments for man's spiritual diversity being warped into fundamentalist oppression.
Powaqqatsi is a poem, not a coherent political treatise.

Powaqqatsi is perhaps the highpoint of Philip Glass' musical output. The score isn't dominated by
hypnotic synthesizer noodlings and weird dissonant Invaders from Mars-like choral effects.
There's instead a whole range of music stylings, much of it suggested by rhythms and instruments
from the Third World, and often rising to a pitch that drives the images on screen instead of simply
accompanying them.

Powaqqatsi looks even better than its predecessor because so much of it is pristine original
camera footage shot by high speed cameras. MGM's generous compression brings it all out in breathtaking
detail and sparkling color. Sometimes we wish there were optional subtitles saying where individual shots
were filmed, as scenes jump from continent to continent with abandon. It's like 50 volumes of
National Geographic images, arranged as that company would never arrange them. Godfrey Reggio is
again fascinating in his 'raving', and it's best to just listen and let his ideas flow over you than
to try and decipher each phrase as you hear it - You don't talk to Godfrey, man, you listen
to him. He doesn't stress the relationship, but this is clearly the work of a spiritual man of faith:
he says his dozen or so years in a monastery ended decades ago, but that's still the man he is.

Both discs have a new trailer for Naqqoykatsi, a phantasmagoria of altered images that would
probably be dubbed Digi-skatsi by my old editorial crew. This one means 'War as a style of life',
and promises to be more controversial (and welcome) even than Powaqqatsi. The trailers for
the first two films are on both discs as well.

1.While at Cannon, Savant cut the trailer for Powaqqatsi, a plum
assignment that got me out of the Penitentiary 3 quality ghetto when Godfrey Reggio insisted
that the cutter of an earlier promo for the film (then called North/South: Powaqqatsi) be given the
trailer. That put me ahead of 3 or four senior cutters who wanted the project. Reggio visited for
twenty minutes to criticize my first cut, which for him was 'too
pretty', too musical, and too 'Film Board of Canada.' After a solid fifteen minutes of the thickest
graduate-film student lingo I'd ever heard (Reggio lives and breathes that stuff) I got the message - make the
trailer less rythmical and less closely tailored to the music track (which was one heck of a difficult
music cutting job). The Powaqqatsi trailer was shown almost nowhere, but graced the front of
the old VHS release. I hustled an article on my trailer in Adweek (how do you sell a movie with no stars,
no plot, no commercial hook?), a self-promotional coup that sprung me from the sinking ship that was Cannon,
and into my first real trailer boutique job, cutting a 70mm advance distributors' promo for The Abyss
... ahh, one doesn't remember the long stretches of unemployment, just the good times. MGM had no copy of
the trailer, so I loaned them my stereophonic copy on video for the DVD.Return